


Glass (Foot, Hand, Throat)

by mais_je_taime



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Abstract Storytelling, Angst, Basically Everyone Sucks and Morty is Suffering, Beth Smith's A+ Parenting, Body Horror, Character Study, Dimension C-137, Dysfunctional Coping Mechanisms, Gen, Implied Violence, Injury Reference, Rick Sanchez's A+ Grandparenting, Self-Harm, Self-Mutilation, Semi-vent piece, Symbolism Abounds, Unreliable Narration, abstract body horror?, blood reference, look I wrote 3.1 pages of semi-coherent artistic morty pain idk what you want from me, or any other i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-16 01:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12332652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mais_je_taime/pseuds/mais_je_taime
Summary: A shard of glass wedges its way into a boy's foot.No one notices. He does not stop to remove it.There are consequences for every (in)action.





	Glass (Foot, Hand, Throat)

There is a shard of glass in his foot. It stings and scrapes.

He continues walking. 

Blood eases out around the shard, filling the soft indents in his skin and smearing on the dunes.

He continues walking. 

The shard is not small; it is easily the length of his thumbnail, though it is narrow and working its way through his skin at an angle. He feels the steady rhythm of his feet push it deeper.

Still, he continues walking. 

The shard sinks deeper, the incision yawns wider. The blood leaves a trail. The pain sends shivering trails of fire up his calf. The hot sand burns his soles and sinks into the edges of the wound, chafing. It hurts. 

He cannot stop walking.

If he does, he may never start again. 

There is nothing to be done about the shard, besides. He has no tools to remove it or bandage the wound. If he took it out, the blood would flow more freely, the sand would fill it. It could become infected. He could die. There is nowhere to put the shard: no pockets or gloved hands to keep it tucked away and harmless. He cannot ( _will not_ ) toss it into the sand for someone else's feet to catch. 

It hurts. 

He continues walking. 

The sand packs around the opening, stinging and grating and ultimately sealing. The blood trail dries up. There is blood smeared over his sole, until that too disappears, scraped off by the rough brush of sand. His skin is raw from the wind and the land and the sun. 

To look at him now, as he walks, you would not see the shard. 

He continues walking. 

He does not stop for rest, somehow carries on ( _and on and on and_ ) without it. He is exhausted, hands trembling, eyes shadowed and sunken, shoulders hunched. 

The skin heals over the shard.

It still grates and grits at muscle and vein and bone where the body shifts around it, but the body adapts. It is wrapped and sealed and hidden, a thin blade in his own skin. When the new layer is fully formed, the sand-scab falls off and is lost to the dunes. 

He does not notice. 

He continues walking. 

He has forgotten the shard. Too many other pains aching in his hands, his legs, his throat, his chest, his eyes, his head. It is still there, in him, but he forgets. 

Another shard.

The process repeats. 

He continues walking. 

The process repeats.

Still, he continues walking.

His feet become more glass than flesh, more web and less solid. Woven around gleaming shards, crunching against one another under the weight of a ( _world- universe- **multiverse**_ ) boy.

He continues walking. 

He continues walking.

He continues--

He is brought to his _**knees**_. He looks up, and the desert is gone. In its place is a hard room, flat and shining, and a gun is placed in his hands, cold and smooth. Across from him is blue. Oasis or unforgiving sky?

But this is not the desert, not anymore. 

This place is nothing like the desert. It is cold, and hard, and there is no heat haze to blur the horizon and create the illusion of a greater ( _better_ ) destination.

He is helped to his feet. Even in shoes with cushioned soles, the glass grinds. For the first time in a long time ( _always walking walking walking, **how long has it been**_ ), he feels it.

It hurts, but he is not walking anymore. Where does he go now? 

( _Does he go? Can he just… stop?_ )

( _Going was important once, so he continued walking._ )

Hands on his. A gun resting limply in his palms, his finger curled around the trigger ( _a reflex_ ). Cold eyes on him. Blue across from him. 

He still knows what direction he was going, in that desert. 

He raises the gun, turns, and curls his finger tight against the trigger. 

He returns to the desert, except, no, he does not. Not quite. The sky is grey and the dunes are soft like young grass and damp earth, no longer harsh grit. Something changed and the desert is less harsh, The ground beneath his feet is firmer. 

The firm ( _hard, too hard, sending ringing thuds up his heels to shake his bones loose from the muscles that bind them_ ) ground shoves the shards through their webs, tears them into dust and mixes it with blood until it is paste under his skin. They grit and grind and he bites his tongue against the pain until he can no longer take it. He falls next to blue ( _oasis? sky? does it still matter_ ). His mouth is open, but he makes no sound. His tongue stings and his mouth is full of a flat-sharp taste, like that of a spoon licked clean. He looks down at his feet, but they give him no answers. The grinding glass he has just remembered is there, but even knowing it, he cannot see it. The signs are all gone, buried under old calluses.

The blue is still ( _tranquil, slumbering, calm before and after the storm_ ) beside him. 

He is not walking. 

He buries his hands in grey, fighting tears in long-dry eyes. Heat slices against cold hands, in the curl of his fingers, and he brings them up to find glass, long and sharp and dark under the grey sky. 

Trembling hands cut and tear from the grey ground. It is soft and thick like pleather in his hands. He lays his ( _ **his**_ ) piece under his feet, and those pale trembling fingers split open the invisible scars. Glass and blood and tissue tumble from the split skin, indiscernible from one another. Separate but impossible to separate. 

Somehow, impossibly, the blood pools against the square he made ( _cut, broke, tore_ ), does not soak into or through. A pile of him and shards lie gleaming on the tile in front of him. He does not cry, though it hurts worse than the shards alone ever did. He chokes on a breath and sinks down over his knees, soles of his feet bare and torn and bleeding sluggishly. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. He closes his eyes for only a moment. When he opens them, the blue has risen like a tide around him, lapping at his clothes and pulling like a current.

He panics. Surges to his feet, the blood and pain ignored ( _again_ ). He pulls up his collection plate in those shaking palms, tucks it all together, and he does not walk. 

He runs. 

The blue is fast but he is faster, knows where it is not willing or able to go. Up a hill or into a ravine; it favors the middle ground. A trail of bloody footprints, so much clearer than before, mark his path behind him, and drops and shards slip out of the corners of his collection. Some splatter or catch on his clothes, but others tumble, are caught by the ground, held to be swallowed by the blue. 

He runs.

The sky chases him from far behind, but the sunset rears ahead of him, pink and orange and red and yellow, and he veers away, running, running, a direction he is not meant to be going. The blood he leaves behind is devoured by sky and sun alike, and he tucks the glass tighter in its wrappings, holds it close to his chest. 

He runs. 

He still has nothing to do with the shards. They are dangerous, sharp. They are broken, useless. All he can do is hold them close and run, run until he can hide them away. Maybe down his throat instead of in his feet; he does not need to speak, and if he does not walk on them, perhaps he can avoid that pain and blood again. 

He runs to the woods. They are sparse and weak, but full of shadows, and he hopes--

The blue tears through. The woods are rushed away by the waves, torn apart where they will not bend and bending where their roots are shallow and their trunks are thin.

He cannot help but feel betrayed as the blue catches him. The forest was so _weak_ , the shelter it offered little but another hazy illusion. 

There is nowhere left to hide as the colors swirl around him. It is too loud and too bright and too close, the shards are piercing through their wrapping and someone (else) will get hurt. 

He curls around himself ( _around the shards_ ) and swallows them down, the blood and glass and detritus, chokes against the taste and texture, cries at the tearing pain. The colors pull him ( _his skin is grey_ ) away from himself ( _should it be grey?_ ) and he lifts his head, smiles over bloody teeth ( _they look afraid_ ) and opens his mouth to say--

_**I'm okay** _

\-- but he traded his voice away and his throat clicks and bleeds, worse and worse as he chokes and coughs. 

His skin is grey. He is silent. The shards and blood are tucked away, away, away.

The colors curl and wail, force open his jaw and reach for the shards, but they only push them deeper, and he curls away from their touch.

The blue disappears again. The grey is stained red and yellow by the burning sunset. He stares at red on grey, curls his bloodied fingers so tight they hurt through the numbness and thinks things were always meant for here. 

Blue shreds itself apart into vapor, finds trails of blood and fragments of glass scattered in the desert it watched over and it screams into the nothingness where it once lay. If it had been willing to be an oasis, it knows, things would not have come this way. It could have been either, and it chose to be the sky. It chose to be the sky.

The colors pull back to their places slowly, unwillingly, bleeding blinding white light like he bleeds red ink, but there is nothing else to be done. ( _More, yes, they could have done more. But not much else._ )

A silent grey boy picks himself up and goes back to walking. He stumbles his way down the border between grey plains and golden desert. He does not stop; if he does, he fears he may never start up again. 

The shards of glass shift and slide and heal into his throat, his chest, crawl down into his stomach and sink lower. Still sharp, they will kill him slowly, slipping closer to heart and lungs and arteries with every breath he takes, but (at least) no one else will be able to see. 

The time for that is long since past.

His tired tread is more wary of glass, but he still walks on rough stones and hot sand. It is part of the path, so he must. Where else would he go? ( _Where is he going now?_ )

**Author's Note:**

> If there is interest, I may write a less abstract and more concrete version of the events of this story-- because there is a concrete timeline under all the violet fairydust-- and upload it as a second (significantly longer) chapter. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ For now this is what it is.


End file.
